To Prius or not to Prius

[mtxpro752]

Simple question, my SUV now gets 15MPG hwy and my commute is 40 miles each way, my wifes car gets 25MPG hwy. Gas is $4.08/gal at the closest 3 stations to my house.

Should I sell mine and get a Prius, keep mine and just drive the wifey's car or get a Honda Element cause I think they are sorta cool?

[dontknowwhy]

Is your commute highway or city roads? I was working 38.2 miles from home and looking at a hybrid Ford but several people, including the car salesman, said it wouldn't be worth the extra money since it was all highway. I ended up getting an Altima which doesn't have as good city MPG as the hybrid Fusion but better highway.

On a side note, now that I'm working 9.2 miles from home, I wish I could sale my Nissan and get something like a Camaro

[westside popo]

Keep the SUV and go on a diet. If you have any balls left don't get the sissy car! Do you honestly want the real men at work to say stuff like this:

Here comes Officer mtxpro752 in his pretty Prius...

[JasperST]

The price may be up on the Prius since they are only made in Japan and production is halted. I think they look doofy myself and would find another type of economy car.

[99 Fenix]

my 5.7 liter V8 firebird gets about 23-25mph highway. i work 33 miles away

[GreenLine]

I looked at a Prius once, but I'm a kayaker and was told by others that anything you put on the roof is going to seriousy whack that awesome gas mileage. Now, if you're only looking at it for a commute and nothing else, it may be OK.

But I don't see why you have to go instantly from one end of the spectrum to the other - SUV to hybrid. There are a lot of alternatives in between. For example, my wife has a Volkswagen Passat diesel. She easily gets 40+ highway, 35 city. It's also nice to be able to run biodiesel in it and give a gigantic middle finger to the middle east. I think the new Jetta TDI's are cheaper than the Prius.

FYI - I just traded in my big truck for a smaller SUV last weekend and when the topic of the tsunami came up, he said they had no Prius' on the lot and none in the pipeline - partly because of the disaster, but partly because they're unveiling new models this fall and don't want to make too many of the current ones.

[DACP]

Simple question..... Should I get a Prius,

[DAL]

Honda is discontinuing the Element.

If you get a fuel-efficient car, you can say that you wanted to stop supporting OPEC. Our oil imports are bad for national security, so driving a fuel-efficient car is patriotic.

[-Erik-]

If I could afford it I would get a hybrid in a heart beat. I say do it. With that long of a daily commute you would be foolish to not invest in something with great MPG.

I will also toss out this suggestion to you. Get yourself one of those cheap base model econo cars that get like 30/35 city and highway MPG. You will save a ton on the car itself and get very good gas mileage. Here is a list of cars from 2010 that are non hybrids that get the best MPG.

Best of luck.

[MD11pilot]

I would rather get a Ford Escape hybrid, looks way better than the ugly prius and it doesn't have the tiny wheels that the prius has.

Or as mentioned get a VW passat powered by diesel.

[mdrdep]

On a side note, ny sister owns a Prius. On Sunday a very large tree snapped in half with the top half landing on top of her while she was doing about 35 mph. She walked away without a scratch and the car still ran too.

[jed2009]

FWIW, I have about 3 months of driving experience with a Prius. Lemme tell you, those things are pretty cool to drive, not to mention get literally 50+ MPG. I drove it in and Iowa winter, too, so it has the ability to get around if you know how to drive it. The only reason we got rid of it was because dad lost his job and it was expensive to pay for and a lot of places didn't have parts for them yet, so maintenance was also expensive. Cool little machines.

[DAL]

Ride a bicycle! You would make the mayor proud!

[Bounce]

You don't have an option for NONE OF THE ABOVE. That being the case, keeping your current SUV is less harmful to the environment that taking a Prius, dust-to-dust, through the system. All hybrids are worse for the environment than keeping your current car longer... batteries, raw materials, disposal, recycling, the weight and complexity of 2 different power trains, and on and on.

A Golf TDI will get better overall mpg than the Prius unless you stick to short, slow, local comutes that can depend on total electric. The miles it would take to recoup the cost of a new car (or an even more expensive hybrid) is hard to justify. The old car is still on the road with the next owner too.

Heck, Top Gear showed that a BMW M3 could get better mpg than a Prius when the Prius was driven aggressively and the M3 simply kept up with the Prius.

I have about 3 months of driving experience with a Prius. Lemme tell you, those things are pretty cool to drive

i hope you meant "cool" temperature wise. my 30-year-old daughter had a prius as a rental for a week and despised it in SoCal traffic. it couldn't merge worth a hoot, had no guts to get it out of the trouble it got itself into, and the mpg wouldn't justify the cost to purchase over other, more traditional power plants. Her daily car is only a Dodge Neon so it's not like she's spoiled to a good car either.

[Firestone]

What I never understood about the great Prius/Hybrid craze:

I could purchase a 2010 Prius for about $26K, or get a 2010 Yaris for about $16K. At $4 a gallon, that extra $10k translates into 2,500 gallons of gas. The Yaris does 35mpg highway (to the Prius' 48), so I'd have to put in 87,500 miles before I started to recoup the initial investment, and I'm usually looking for a new car by then. As for the environmental thing, I defer to those who know better than I do, but this uneducated simpleton has a hard time imagining that those batteries are "green" to produce and dispose of. Anyways, that's my 2¢, I usually do whatever makes me happy so go with the Element if that's what you want.